Reelin' and Writin'

Congratulations to friend, comrade, and contessa of cinema Farran Smith Nehme on the publication of her first novel, Missing Reels, where the romance of the city meets the romance of old movies, tango'ing between the rich palette of the Hannah and Her Sisters 80's and the patchy, velvety monochrome of silent classics. Remarkably assured, neatly plotted, deftly paced, and charming as all get out, it may be the first novel with the churchly soul of a revival house, taking us back to the glory days when the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Elgin, and so many more theaters were running double features of Hollywood and foreign favorites, and film buffs partook of a movable feast.

FSN and czarina Molly Haskell, whom I've had the pleasure of having drinks with at the Algonquin, which I mention only to make everyone envious, share thoughts about the novel, the lost world of the revival house, and sleuthing quest for lost films at the Criterion site in a conversation titled "Downtown Screwball."

Molly Haskell: First of all, congratulations on a terrific novel. It’s wonderfully fresh and original, a combination of screwball comedy and mystery story. And like you, and your heroine, Ceinwen—who also happens to be a southern transplant!—it’s in love with silent cinema. Tell me how the idea came to you and how it evolved.

Farran Smith Nehme: Thank you so much. I hadn’t intended to write a novel, but some friends—perhaps in a spirit of mischief, considering the work involved—had been telling me I should try. There was one problem, though: I didn’t have a plot. I stumbled across an idea by accident, and here I get to name-drop Kevin Brownlow, one of my heroes. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a dinner with him in New York, during which we heard many stories about the world of collectors and the strange ways Brownlow has tracked down the elements of the films he’s restored. I said to him something like “I guess collecting attracts some strange characters.” He leaned in and said, with a big grin and a twinkle, “You have no idea.”

[snip]

MH: I love the Brownlow story. I remember traipsing down to the East Village, and the Theatre 80 St. Marks, with Andrew [Sarris] in the ’80s. Although I thought they had mostly talkies, from the early ’30s. Also, Bill Everson used to show movies fairly regularly at the New School. He comes into your novel, as do other real people, along with the buffs and geeks. Ceinwen is so poor and disenfranchised, she doesn’t have a license or a passport, and presumably no membership to MoMA, where she really could feast on silent films. She has a kind of tunnel vision; she’s hooked on the past, which allows you to ignore a lot of cinematic activity that was going on around that time—the critical spats, Cahiers du cinéma in English, foreign films.

FSN: Yes, I don’t think Theatre 80 ever screened silent movies, although they certainly showed some rare talkies. Literary license is one of the perks of novel writing, as opposed to my blogging, where I labor to check every fact. Ceinwen sees her old-movie habit as a hobby and an escape, but she isn’t plugged into the scene, as you say. One thing that Raquel Stecher mentioned in her review of this book is how old-movie lovers crave the company of like-minded people, and how difficult finding such company could be in the days before the Internet. Ceinwen eventually solves the problem by meeting some folks, and just plain drafting some others as foot soldiers for her obsessions. By the end, as she’s matured, you can see that her movie taste has expanded, too.

MH: Yes, buffs sought each other out. I wrote in my Andrew memoir [Love and Other Infectious Diseases] about the Huff Society, an informal group that met to see this or that utterly obscure film in odd, makeshift places, NYU classrooms . . . There would be people like your novel’s NYU professors Andy Evans and Harry (though the latter is a little too normal). Andrew used to joke that they would rather see a film that nobody had ever seen than a truly good film—indeed, the criterion for “goodness” would be unknownness...

Without their archeological zeal, so much more of our perishable film heritage would have been lost forever.